Paul Mattick and Otto Strasser

[Apsken at aol.com]

Off-list James heartfield asked me for documentation of my report on Paul
Mattick's connection to Otto Strasser. Below is a copy of my reply.
Incidentally, the political point is not simply one of 50-plus years past.
Several of the insurgent Nazi terror groups, both in the U.S. and in Europe,
are Strasserite (revolutionary anti-capitalist plebeian national socialist  --
"red" Nazis) whose political lines are pitched to militant proletarians,
marginal family farmers, and struggling petit bourgeois. Some of them believe
that sections of the Marxist left also are prospective converts.

Ken Lawrence

James,

Unfortunately my archives are beyond my reach in Mississippi, in the hands of
a hostile former spouse. Some years ago at a Socialist Party book bazaar in
Chicago I purchased a run of Living Marxism from the 1940s and 50s, which
included a pile of the organization's leaflets. Among those was the one
advertising the Strasser tour.

Abstractly, it should not have surprised me, because it reflected the triumph
of spontaneist politics above all, as well as the view that Leninism is the
main enemy of the proletariat. But I was myself part of the broader
spontaneist Marxist current myself, being a friend and comrade of C.L.R.
James, so this caused me plenty of soul searching.

The Who's Who I quoted also says this about Strasser: "During his exile in
Sweden and Canada, Otto Strasser became an advocate of 'solidarism', a third
path between capitalism and communism, which he gave a national-socialist,
Christian and decentralized 'Europeanist' colouring. Returning to post-war
West Germany, Otto Strasser tried and failed to win public support for these
ideas in the 1950s after he had recovered his German citizenship. In other
respects he appeared to have learned nothing from the past, still espousing a
vicious, demagogic anti-semitism in his journmalistic publications."

I think you can see from that the points that appealed to Mattick. But the
collaboration was unforgivable nonetheless.

Ken